I’ve been in quite a pickle recently: I needed to find out how many and what Azure Policy definitions from Guest Configuration category are currently assigned to my subscription, so that I could understand if any of those policies are applicable to Azure Arc-enabled servers that are residing in the same subscription. Why? Well, because Guest Configuration is a billed functionality, when it comes to Azure Arc. In this case it’s good to get an overview if any policies related to the billed functionality are enabled in order to further evaluate if you want to use this functionality or not (and therefore disable it to avoid undesired billing). You may also have different use cases for why you would want to retrieve the same information from Azure Policy🧐 ...

If you’re using Application Insights SDK in your .NET applications and you want to gather performance counters like disk, memory or CPU usage, you have two main approaches that you can follow: EventCounters: this is a future-proof, cross-platform alternative to classic performance counters that natively supports collection of system and custom counters both from .NET Framework and .NET (Core) applications. I will share more about EventCounters and how you can use these in a subsequent blog post, therefore EventCounters are out of scope for this blog post. ...

⚠️ Please note that Azure vulnerability scanning with the integrated Qualys scanner has now been deprecated (as of 1st of May 2024). In the modern reality with tens of security vulnerabilities that are being disclosed daily you need to continuously implement a variety of security controls in order to ensure that your systems are strongly protected. Even if you’re running on the cloud⛅ One of the security controls that I would like to talk about in this blog post is vulnerability scanning. Vulnerability scanning is an essential practice for maintaining a secure infrastructure, mitigating risks, and protecting sensitive data from potential threats. It allows organizations to stay proactive, comply with regulations, and safeguard their systems against known vulnerabilities and emerging security risks. ...

Last month, 18th-21st of April, KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe was happening in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and it was HUGE! With a fully sold out event, with more than 10000 in-person participants, 5000+ online participants and 20 parallell tracks, it has been the largest conference I’ve attended in-person so far. I attended the event wearing many hats: a speaker, KCD organizer, CNCF ambassador and an attendee. Having these roles gave me an even broader perspective of the event which I want to share with the community😺 ...

There are cases where you may need to explicitly ensure that specific container image registries are blacklisted from being used in your Kubernetes clusters. Let me provide you with a very recent and relevant example. From 3rd April 2023, k8s.gcr.io legacy image registry is officially frozen which means that no images, future Kubernetes versions and patch releases for earlier Kubernetes versions will be pushed to this registry. At some point in the near future this legacy image registry will be completely deactivated. ...